Motives

My motives caravan

through a red, peerless desert.

Water travels just ahead

slightly faster than either I

or my mirror glass needs

can go.

Out here,

straws and dictionaries

present serious problems.

As though it were dead skin

scraped from the devil’s heel

by a pumice stone,

my purest motive blows

around the others.

If I flew my determinations

like kites,

attached to my stringy nerves,

could they rise to Heaven

and beg for a cloud?